McGinn: Despite my spelling bee win, I kant spell

News-Sun columnists Tom Stafford (left) and Andrew McGinn were victorious last week at the Altrusa Club's annual spelling bee. Then the ugly truth came out: McGinn is secretly illiterate.

MARSHALL GORBY News-Sun columnists Tom Stafford (left) and Andrew McGinn were victorious last week at the Altrusa Club's annual spelling bee. Then the ugly truth came out: McGinn is secretly illiterate.

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McGinn

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By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer 9:20 AM Friday, October 7, 2011

There are times when I wish I could just say, “You’re right. I have a drug problem.”

Those times when it’d be easier to go, “I’m sorry, but I just spent the last week in the Clark County Jail ’cause Staker Alloys got all weird when I wheeled in that statue of A.B. Graham to scrap in an Aldi shopping cart. So help me God, though, if I don’t get some Xanax, I’ll tear the bronze head right off of Clementine Berry Buchwalter.”

At least then my actions could be explained.

Heck, I could probably even get some sympathy, provided I didn’t personally break into your house while you were on vacation and flood the basement in an attempt to steal the copper plumbing to feed my growing dependence on OxyContin.

But as it stands, the fact that I misspelled two words in a photo caption — a photo, that is, of me victoriously hoisting a spelling bee trophy last week — just makes me look like an idiot.

I have only myself to blame.

I knew I didn’t belong on the News-Sun spelling bee team that my fellow columnist, Tom Stafford, assembles every year to compete in the Altrusa Club’s Literacy Sting against other local businesses and organizations.

In all my years at the paper, I’d never once been asked.

But, hey, when Batman has to put together a new Justice League and he looks out and sees that every other hero has retired except for Aquaman, Metamorpho and Beppo the Super-Monkey, it leaves a guy with few options.

It’s OK. I’m used to it.

When choosing players for kickball teams back in fourth grade, it frequently came down to me and the kid who had to wear a diaper — and it couldn’t always be guaranteed that, just because I didn’t smell like a catfish, I’d be picked before him.

But I was still more than happy to join Stafford’s three-person team, which had never won the noontime spelling bee in the fundraiser’s 14-year history.

Funny, considering how we deal almost exclusively with words.

But for a writer, I have a shockingly limited vocabulary, making my presence on the team feel even more like that movie in which the Bad News Bears get to play at the Astrodome.

Oh, yeah, and it’s worth noting that the third member of the paper’s team called in sick that day, leaving just me and Stafford to face off last Tuesday against 20 other teams — some of which were made up of doctors and lawyers.

Frankly, you don’t screw around with people who can easily spell “mesothelioma.”

Because of that, I planned to spend the night before the bee reading the dictionary — unfortunately, I didn’t make it past “aardwolf” before I decided to watch TV instead.

But what I hadn’t expected was the gladiatorial-like atmosphere of the event.

We contestants were forced to line up single file outside the banquet hall at the Courtyard by Marriott in order for our teams to be introduced one by one.

The other teams had all brought cheering sections with pom-poms and kazoos, and the cacophony — I had to look that word up — rattled me.

It felt like I was about to enter Thunderdome.

And I swear I heard the crowd chanting, “Two men enter, one man leaves!”

That, along with some person in a demonic bee costume who went around popping helium balloons with what I believe to have been a hypodermic needle affixed to a stick after a team misspelled a word, rendered me stupid.

Like a shell-shocked second-lieutenant on Omaha Beach, I had to be carried to the paper’s first-ever spelling bee victory.

By the time we got back to work, I thought I had pulled myself together enough to write a caption for Marshall Gorby’s photo of Stafford and me in triumph.

Apparently not, as I managed to misspell both “businesses” and “Courtyard,” and the typos managed to get into the paper.

“Marshall said he told you that you misspelled businesses,” a co-worker explained the next morning. “He said you just grunted at him.”

I blame it on PTSD.

Post-traumatic spelling disorder.

Contact this reporter at amcginn@coxohio.com.

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